Today, when talking about refugees and immigrants fleeing from war-ravaged countries, the debate is completely polarised in the Western world. Instead of a multitude of different opinions and voices, there are only two parties. You either want the “aliens” out of your country because they’re evil monsters that will steal your job and money, or you must help them at all costs because “races are just a cultural construct.” The entire debate is highly emotional, and any opinion that falls in between is either branded as racist supremacy or soft liberalism.
But what’s happening in the Western world? I worked for years for an important NGO and saw the reality of what immigrants live through first-hand. More importantly, I saw how hypocritical the world that surrounds them on both sides is. Those who want to help them and those who want them out of our country are just two sides of the same coin. A fake one, indeed.
It is easy to manipulate the minds of countless people by repeating the same story over and over again. The less educated people prefer to see immigrants (especially those of colour) as enemies, while more educated people fall for the “noble savage” rhetoric and do all they can to take care of them more like pets than like humans. Vested interests and political parties stand behind this enormous operation of social manipulation, which is nothing but an excuse to protect entrenched privileges and fuel class warfare. However, among many alleged winners, there is only one real loser in this endless war of hypocrisy – humanity as a whole.
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Shortly after taking my medical degree (Masters in Pharmacy), just like many other people of my age I had to face the terrible spectre of unemployment. After so many years spent studying complex subjects such as medicine and pharmacology, the only things I had to succeed in life were a piece of paper that defined me as a “doctor” and a wealth of knowledge I had to exploit fully. However, the young me did not care much about money – I felt the urge to put this knowledge to some use, and achieve a higher goal. I wanted to find a way to provide the so-much-needed medical care to those who really needed it. I wanted to help those masses of destitute refugees that were crossing our country in search of a better life rather than selling high blood pressure pills to wealthy and spoiled retirees.
That’s why I decided to start working for an NGO – do my part to make the world a better place, help these poor fellas who lost everything they had: their (already scarce) finances, their families, and often even their dignity. It was an incredible experience that allowed me to see the world from a completely different perspective. I felt their just rage as they vented on me their disappointment about the lives they found here. I was overwhelmed by their pain and shame as they remembered all the torture and cruelties they had to endure only to reach our coasts. All those positive and negative feelings made me realize that all we experience here in Europe is dull and bland. Our “first world problems” are nothing compared to all this. But while I had to put everything in perspective once again, I also realized that those feelings were so much stronger than what we are used to. Empathizing all their struggles was an inebriating and intoxicating experience. I felt like everything else I had in my life was meaningless and pointless compared to doing what really mattered – helping them all, saving them from their destinies.
I started meeting other people who worked in the world of NGOs and volunteering, shared my experience with them, and saw that most of them felt the same way. Empathy got the best of them as well, and their mission has rapidly evolved into a crusade: Saving people. But saving them from who, or what, exactly? That was when I realised that reality was slowly warping in front of my eyes. My ability to perceive things objectively and correctly was hampered – empathy drives strong emotions, but emotionality is the opposite of reasoning. All these volunteers were not fighting to save other people from a terrible destiny by really changing society as a whole. We did not see the broader structural and historical issues at play. We were only driven by a basic survival instinct – the instinct to protect the weak and to protect our offspring. In a twisted and convoluted way, these poor, suffering people had become our children, and we had to fight to nurture them one by one blindly. But charity has never been a solution to anything, it was eventually clear to me that we were all doing it the wrong way.
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The world of volunteering and NGOs solely focus on one (quite important) aspect of the constant struggle faced by refugees and immigrants. All the current debates are centered on the policies on the reception of immigrants, and what kind of life we may grant them in terms of employment opportunities, human rights, education, and healthcare. That is fine, those are really important things. But the root of the issue lies somewhere else, instead.
Most refugees arriving in Europe risked everything they had in the often vain hope they could find a chance to live a better life. But their illusion crumbles once they meet the truth of what our Western world really is. Their deep disappointment comes from the fact that our world is not so much better than theirs, after all. Yes, here we don’t have to struggle to get health care, clean water, or fresh food, but every other aspect of our society is just as decaying and corrupted as it is in Africa. Just as decadent as humanity is, and has always been. But for them, as foreigners, it is even worse. No place can ever provide you with happiness when you’re living in a country that is thousands of miles away from home, from your family, from everything you love. You are renouncing everything that matters in life, only to find yourself estranged in a rakish society that is infected by the same vices, the same corruption, the same urge to warp reality around you.
Western governments tell their people the same lies that are told to Africans by their own administrations. We are just as blinded and our perception is as distorted as everywhere else. People are unhappy in Italy as in any other place – we enjoy more freedom and more wealth, that’s true, but only if you’re born here. For everyone else, even just other Western people coming from different countries, you’re either rich already, or you’re lost. This is a problem that affects the human society as a whole, and it is the consequence of educating countless generations to prevarication and hate. Hate that knows no boundaries and that ironically draws its strength from The Other. It is the instinct to bully and prey on the weak to take whatever we want right here, right now.
A basic lesson of common sense that every one of us learns as we grow is that we can’t help others until we’re able to help ourselves. All immigrants and refugees in the world flee from home to achieve the same goal: finding happiness. The Western world has nothing to offer immigrants, though. It can’t save them from unhappiness because it is ultimately too emotional and irrational to be able to help itself, and it projects that irrationality on those coming in.
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Meanwhile, as much as the NGO world was driven by blind earnestness, racism was on the rise. It took just a few years for our European society to morph into the crucible of hate that it is now. Today, neo-fascism is said to be a disease that is corrupting the very roots of our culture, distorting our most recent past and deconstructing history through a lethal admixture of propaganda and revisionism. In the first half of the 20th century, fascism was a tragedy that ravaged the whole continent. It was the beginning of an age of brutality and repression that culminated with Nazism. Together, these dictatorships regenerated a distorted sense of national pride that justified the massacre of thousands of Africans behind the excuse of “civilising through colonialism.”
We know how horrible fascism was, but we tend to forget a fundamental, yet underrated aspect of this political drift. Fascism was an anti-cultural phenomenon that vocalised some of the worst, but innate, aspects of human behavior. It was the triumph of egocentrism, individualism, and that irresistible desire for supremacy through abuse that every human being feels – even if it’s buried deep inside our psyches. We often debate about the fact that there’s a huge difference between the idea of fascism, its ideology, and its main drivers, and the way it manifested in practice. Some argue that just like any other ideology, had its good points, but the way humans eventually put it in practice was a dysfunctional parody of an otherwise enlightened form of government.
That’s not true. The form that was actualised by Benito Mussolini was exactly what fascism is and it is supposed to be. A gigantic lie portrayed by a bunch of mediocre individuals that draw strength from numbers – a pack of brutes that abuses other people by using “violence in numbers” to obtain undeserved privileges. Fascism is the exaltation of mediocrity; it preys on dissatisfaction by channeling the rage that comes from frustration and using it to manipulate less educated people. That’s why it now looks so appealing once again to the masses of less fortunate, less wealthy, and poorly educated people of the European society. Neo-fascism promises them the chance to fight against an unjust society, to get back what got taken from them by more influential individuals through violence and brutality.
In what it promises to achieve, it is not so different from progressivism or leftist ideology. It promises to give these people a more equal society and enjoy some of the privileges that are now the exclusive preserve of a handful of individuals. It gives the illusion of improving the quality of their lives, and finally get the happiness they deserve just like any other human being. Neo-fascists perceive themselves as a minority – just like women or the LGBTQ community – they feel they have the right to be treated more equally, to enjoy a better world to live. They need an enemy to survive, someone against which they could fight because it’s the reason why they are deprived of their rights. The more this enemy is de-humanized, the more this illusion becomes real. For neo-fascists, the enemy is a black man, speaking a different language, with a different culture, praying a different god, coming from a distant place. It must barely look human to them – they know he or she is like them, but the wider is the difference, the easier it gets to hate. For leftists and progressivists, the enemy is not a Muslim, a homosexual person, or an immigrant. The object of their hate is the neo-fascist itself: a brute that renounced all humanity.
The main difference, however, is that the neo-fascists think they can obtain all their goals of equality through the only mean they have – violence and brutality. Leftists despise violence, and more often than not, they fear it. They can’t use it as a mean to obtain their goals – unless it’s passive violence. Is that better? In many ways it is. But it doesn’t matter actually, because eventually, it all comes down to one simple fact: both these ideologies are nothing but lies told to small people to convince them into putting some other manipulative individual into power. It doesn’t matter whether its Benito Mussolini, Iosif Stalin, or Adolf Hitler. It doesn’t matter if he’s Donald Trump or Matteo Salvini. They’re just lies used to prey on the masses to obtain power, and in today’s world, the neo-fascists win because of their willingness to use brutality.
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The rhetoric of hate may appear different for the rhetoric of charity since it must appeal to a different audience, but they both draw power from irrationality, emotionalism, and, ultimately, mediocrity. If we want to live in a world where we can enjoy true equality, we must take our distance from all the empty words of those who tell us what we should do. Personal education, individual growth and a collective spirit are the only weapons that let us defend against these forms of propaganda and manipulation. The world isn’t either black or white, right or left, fascist, or communist. The world is built upon differences, but there are many more than just two.
Children describe things around them as either “good” or “bad” and trust instincts and emotions to make decisions. Adults know that there are many shades of grey between black and white, and that only logic and reasoning can help us know what’s good and bad for us and everybody else as well. We need to open our eyes and grow if we want to survive as a species. If we keep experiencing and understand the world as irrational children, humanity is going to lose badly in the end.
